Everyone in this room intends to succeed as a high school student, yes? As a fellow AP student, I understand and share the pressures being put on you as well as the stress schoolwork can bring. Succeeding in school is difficult. And the education system in place today increases that difficulty by preventing us students from fully understanding concepts that we are being taught and by hindering us from realizing our full intellectual potential.
We find ourselves here, in an AP classroom. We are the smart kids. We are the studiers, the thinkers, and the “leaders of tomorrow,” as the Board of Education likes to say. Isolated from the “regents kids,” we compete within our own faction of Whitman. And within our little faction, we find a series of sub-factions. Here, you will find both the apex students and the pseudo-academics.
Does anyone enjoy spending vacation time completing projects and immense amounts of homework? Does anyone enjoy missing out on parties, on visiting relatives, and going on vacation to do busywork, that, for the most part, is never even looked at or graded? Does anyone actually retain all or any of the information “learned” from summer assignments, or is it rushed to completion because you are not allowed out until it is done?
AP Language students in Mr. Pipolo's class speak their minds on critical issues facing teenagers and what we can do to solve them.
February 20, 2016
Summer assignments are often bemoaned by students as unnecessarily laborious and detracting from a much-needed two months of relaxation. This year's task for AP Language students, however, was designed...
Do you ever take breaks while doing your homework? Do you use your phone during these breaks and find yourself opening several different social media apps? Amongst those apps, do you ever find yourself just scrolling through some nice photos, until all of a sudden you look up to check the time and it’s been a half hour or more?
Now, I know this applies to more than 75 percent of the people in this room alone. Just think about how many people it affects in this school altogether.
Let that sink in.
You have a 4.0, they have a 3.1. You were the president of all the Honor Societies, they participated in one club. You won numerous awards for academic success, they won none. You dedicated hours of your time to complete volunteer work, they did not.
So who gets the job? They do, of course.
But wait, how can that be? You were obviously the better candidate. So why wasn't the job given to you?
The answer is simple, really--your competition had a trait that you didn't. Your competition could speak three languages while you were only able to speak one.
Picture this.
It’s 5 PM, and your practice just finished. It’s late. You’re exhausted. You want to go home. So you make your way to the bus platform to catch your bus. But there’s one problem. There is no bus. You know your parents aren’t out of work yet, and they’re half an hour away, anyway. So that is out of the question. The one friend you can ask for a ride is unavailable. The only option you’re left with is to walk home. You have to carry your school bag, clothes, shoes, equipment and gym bag. It’s already getting dark out. You’re cold and tired and have a 25-minute walk awaiting you. You don’t live in the safest neighborhood, but are left with no choice. So you take a chance. You brace yourself for the dangers and risks of the neighborhood and walk home.
You’re sitting in a classroom, watching another video for the third time this week on something that you haven’t even learned yet. You’re now sitting at home, trying to teach yourself difficult material because you hardly learned anything in class. Now, you’re taking a test and thinking to yourself, I know nothing.
You can well assume that your teacher is not worried about complaints because they won’t affect his or her job. You can already picture yourself being unprepared for next year’s course because of your unmotivated teacher. Does this situation sound familiar?
I’m sure we’ve all had one or two teachers that popped into our mind. The thing is, what can we do about it?
Allow me to remind you of a familiar experience to many in classrooms today:
As the experienced, loved teacher greets his class, he is required to issue a special Common Core workbook. This workbook is filled with questions of a caliber that he and his colleagues, three PhDs and one master’s degree among them, could not fathom. Having to teach the content in this new curriculum is a burden on the teacher. Struggling to understand the content is death to the student.
I don’t think any of us here need to be briefed on why or how community service is important. Volunteering is proven to have social, psychological, and cognitive benefits. And not just only for those who have actually done the volunteering.
Through volunteering, students become engaged in the community and are given a chance to build a relationship with the population they are serving. Psychologically, community service is known to improve mood, reduce stress, and increase self-efficiency. When asked to explain the importance of community service, one honor-roll student said, “Volunteers learn that their work makes a difference and it makes them feel good.”
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A profuse amount of people are aware of poverty and its far-reaching effects. However, it needs to be known that not all human beings share this knowledge. Poverty is a problem. Additionally, it affects...
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